every sect and shade to whom the accomplishment of the great work was intrusted; he was acquainted with several of the men and knew them to be of extremely mediocre abilities. Would not the strongest among them come in collision and neutralize one another amid the clashing ideas which they represented? But on the day when the ceremony of the inauguration of the Commune took place before the Hotel de Ville, amid the thunder of artillery and trophies and red banners floating in the air, his boundless hopes again got the better of his fears and he ceased to doubt. Among the lies of some and the unquestioning faith of others, the illusion started into life again with renewed vigor, in the acute crisis of the malady raised to paroxysmal pitch.
During the entire month of April Maurice was on duty in the neighborhood of Neuilly. The gentle warmth of the early spring had brought out the blossoms on the lilacs, and the fighting was conducted among the bright verdure of the gardens; the National Guards came into the city at night with bouquets of flowers stuck in their muskets. The troops collected at Versailles were now so numerous as to warrant their formation in two armies, a first line under the orders of Marshal MacMahon and a reserve commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune had nearly a hundred thousand National Guards mobilized and as many more on the rosters who could be called out at short notice, but fifty thousand were as many as they ever brought into the field at one time. Day by day the plan of attack adopted by the Versaillese became more manifest: after occupying Neuilly they had taken possession of the Chateau of Becon and soon after of Asnieres, but these movements were simply to make the investment more complete, for their intention was to enter the city by the Point-du-Jour soon as the converging fire from Mont-Valerien and Fort d'Issy should enable them to carry the rampart there. Mont-Valerien was theirs already, and they were straining every nerve to capture Issy, utilizing the works abandoned by the Germans for the purpose. Since the middle of April the fire of musketry and artillery had been incessant; at Levallois and Neuilly the fighting never ceased, the skirmishers blazing away uninterruptedly, by night as well as by day. Heavy guns, mounted on armored cars, moved to and fro on the Belt Railway, shelling Asnieres over the roofs of Levallois. It was at Vanves and Issy, however, that the cannonade was fiercest; it shook the windows of Paris as the siege had done when it was at its height. And when finally, on the 9th of May, Fort d'Issy was obliged to succumb and fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was assured, and in their frenzy of panic the leaders resorted to most detestable measures.
Maurice favored the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. The warnings of history came to his mind; had not the hour struck for adopting energetic methods if they wished to save the country? There was but one of their barbarities that really pained him, and that was the destruction of the Vendome column; he reproached himself for the feeling as being a childish weakness, but his grandfather's voice still sounded in his ears repeating the old familiar tales of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa-those epic narratives that thrilled his pulses yet as often as he thought of them. But that they should demolish the house of the murderer Thiers, that they should retain the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, was not that right and just when the Versaillese were unchaining their fury on Paris, bombarding it, destroying its edifices, slaughtering women and children with their shells? As he saw the end of his dream approaching dark thoughts of ruin and destruction filled his mind. If their ideas of justice and retribution were not to prevail, if they were to be crushed out of them with their life-blood, then perish the world, swept away in one of those cosmic upheavals that are the beginning of a new life. Let Paris sink beneath the waves, let it go up in smoke and flame, like a gigantic funeral pyre, sooner than let it be again delivered over to its former state of vice and misery, to that old vicious social system of abominable injustice. And he dreamed another dark, terrible dream, the great city reduced to ashes, naught to be seen on either side the Seine but piles of smoldering ruins, the festering wound purified and healed with fire, a catastrophe without a name, such as had never been before, whence should arise a new race. Wild stories were everywhere circulated, which interested him intensely, of the mines that were driven under all the quarters of the city, the barrels of powder with which the catacombs were stuffed, the monuments and public buildings ready to be blown into the air at a moment's notice; and all were connected by electric wires in such a way that a single spark would suffice to set them off; there were great stores of inflammable substances, too, especially petroleum, with which the streets and avenues were to be converted into seething lakes of flame. The Commune had sworn that should the Versaillese enter the city not one of them would ever get beyond the barricades that closed the ends of the streets; the pavements would yawn, the houses would sink in ruins, Paris would go up in flames, and bury assailants and assailed under its ashes.
And if Maurice solaced himself with these crazy dreams, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He had lost all confidence in its members, he felt it was inefficient, drawn this way and that by so many conflicting elements, losing its head and becoming purposeless and driveling as it saw the near approach of the peril with which it was menaced. Of the social reforms it had pledged itself to it had not been able to accomplish a single one, and it was now quite certain that it would leave behind it no great work to perpetuate its name. But what more than all beside was gnawing at its vitals was the rivalries by which it was distracted, the corroding suspicion and distrust in which each of its members lived. For some time past many of them, the more moderate and the timid, had ceased to attend its sessions. The others shaped their course day by day in accordance with events, trembling at the idea of a possible dictatorship; they had reached that point where the factions of revolutionary assemblages exterminate one another by way of saving the country. Cluzeret had become suspected, then Dombrowski, and Rossel was about to share their fate. Delescluze, appointed Civil Delegate at War, could do nothing of his own volition, notwithstanding his great authority. And thus the grand social effort that they had had in view wasted itself in the ever-widening isolation about those men, whose power had become a nullity, whose actions were the result of their despair.
In Paris there was an increasing feeling of terror. Paris, irritated at first against Versailles, shivering at the recollection of what it had suffered during the siege, was now breaking away from the Commune. The compulsory enrollment, the decree incorporating every man under forty in the National Guard, had angered the more sedate citizens and been the means of bringing about a general exodus: men in disguise and provided with forged papers of Alsatian citizenship made their escape by way of Saint-Denis; others let themselves down into the moat in the darkness of the night with ropes and ladders. The wealthy had long since taken their departure. None of the factories and workshops had opened their doors; trade and commerce there was none; there was no employment for labor; the life of enforced idleness went on amid the alarmed expectancy of the frightful denouement that everyone felt could not be far away. And the people depended for their daily bread on the pay of the National Guards, that dole of thirty sous that was paid from the millions extorted from the Bank of France, the thirty sous for the sake of which alone many men were wearing the uniform, which had been one of the primary causes and the
Maurice, who had never been a drinking man, allowed himself to be seduced by the too prevalent habit of over- indulgence. It had become a thing of frequent occurrence with him now, when he was out on picket duty or had to spend the night in barracks, to take a 'pony' of brandy, and if he took a second it was apt to go to his head in the alcohol-laden atmosphere that he was forced to breathe. It had become epidemic, that chronic drunkenness, among those men with whom bread was scarce and who could have all the brandy they wanted by asking for it. Toward evening on Sunday, the 21st of May, Maurice came home drunk, for the first time in his life, to his room in the Rue des Orties, where he was in the habit of sleeping occasionally. He had been at Neuilly again that day, blazing away at the enemy and taking a nip now and then with the comrades, to see if it would not relieve the terrible fatigue from which he was suffering. Then, with a light head and heavy legs, he came and threw himself on the bed in his little chamber; it must have been through force of instinct, for he could never remember how he got there. And it was not until the following morning, when the sun was high in the heavens, that he awoke, aroused by the ringing of the alarm bells, the blare of trumpets and beating of drums. During the night the Versaillese, finding a gate undefended, had effected an unresisted entrance at the Point-du-Jour.
When he had thrown on his clothes and hastened down into the street, his musket slung across his shoulder by
